A small snippet from David Whyte’s keynote address about why readers need to live a courageous life:
“Writer’s block has to do with the attempt to keep a conversation going long beyond its shelf life.”
As an antidote, David suggested the discipline of asking ourselves “beautiful questions,” questions that enable us to have a conversation between our history and the ground on which we stand and the new, unknown horizon before us.
These are some of the beautiful questions David suggested:
- What is my relationship to the unknown?
- What is my relationship to silence?
- How much am I in a real conversation with something other than myself? What relationship do I have to voices other than my own–what David calls, “the invitational horizon?”
“Poetry,” David said, “is the art of overhearing yourself saying things you didn’t want to know.”